


Veracity

by unwindmyself



Series: curious shapes shift in the dark [61]
Category: True Blood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Confessions, Detox, F/M, Fix-It, Heart-to-Heart, Vampire Family, agency and choices!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-29
Updated: 2014-11-29
Packaged: 2018-02-27 10:11:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2688971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwindmyself/pseuds/unwindmyself
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eric and Nora and their long, meandering past-present-future of a necessary post-battle conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Veracity

**Author's Note:**

> Part four, "Superstar."

“I’m surprised,” Eric says dryly as he shuts the door to their room and sets Nora down.

“About what?” she asks, putting a hand on her hip and affecting her brattiest expression.

“Jessica,” he returns. “Even just out of the babies, I’d have put her as your least likely.”

Nora rolls her eyes. “Tara’s accounted for, and like hell I’d try to get in the way of _that_ ,” she declares.

“Of course, if she wasn’t…”

“That would be a different matter,” she says plainly, plopping right down on the floor starting to unlace her boots. Her niece is a beautiful woman, she’s been able to see that from the start, but she doesn’t like interfering when it’s not allowed. Maybe in decades, Pam and Tara will be comfortable enough to be open to taking other lovers sometimes, and Nora’s not opposed to the idea of stepping in, but that’s not the case right now, and she respects that.

“You know there’s a perfectly good bed and a perfectly good chair just feet away from you,” he points out, smirking.

She shrugs. “Don’t care.” With one boot gone, she begins to work at the other. “And fucking Willa would be like fucking a barely postadolescent version of myself. I for one have never seen the appeal of doppelgänger sex, and anyway, she’s got her eye on someone.”

“If she’s a tiny you,” he muses, trying not to smile too much at the idea (he knows it’s a true one), “I think she’d be wise enough to see that she shouldn’t act on her little thing for Tara.”

“Not _that_ ,” she retorts. She flops backward, arches her hips up so she can wiggle out of her jeans. “It’s her fairy girl, you know, the one who dresses like a hipster beauty queen.”

“Sister, they’re _literally_ babies,” he teases. He’s not sure whether he should help her up and undress her or just let her go at it as oddly as she seems inclined to, so he starts undressing himself instead. It’s not nearly such a production as she’s making of it, of course, but it needs to be done.

“I’m not imagining it,” Nora defends. “Willa told me. We had a whole talk about it while she was nannying me.”

“You’re diverting from my original topic,” Eric points out.

“Jessica,” she says, sitting sharply up again and yanking her top off.

“Yes,” he agrees. “I have the feeling that wasn’t just a celebratory heat of the moment kiss.”

“No,” she says, and he knows that tone, all cagey and aloof like she either wants him to work it out of her or doesn’t want to talk at all.

“That leads me to believe you’ve been courting and didn’t tell me,” he continues.

“No,” she repeats.

“Really.”

“Really.” She frowns, rips a strip from the hem of her top to clean some of the blood from her skin. “We’d kissed once before, but we haven’t fucked. I don’t know if she even wants to fuck me.”

Suddenly he’s up behind her, grabbing the chain of the necklace that of course he’s noticed by now. “Where did this come from?” he asks, though he’s figured it out.

“Jessica gave it to me,” she says, giving a little shrug.

“Jessica gave it to you,” he repeats. “I think I’ve got a hunch why, and it’s not just a friendship necklace. She’s young but she’s not _that_ young.”

“I'm not going to presume anything,” she says stubbornly, swatting his hand away ineffectively and falling back against his legs when she gets bored of resisting. “I just know that I like her and I think she’s pretty and originally I wanted to kiss her and so I did, and tonight she wanted to kiss me and so she did and I was happy to return it.”

“An understatement,” he smirks, hauling her to her feet and whisking her to sit on the edge of the bed. “I was afraid you were going to pull her pants off and take her right there in front of all of us.”

Nora makes a face, but she doesn’t try to move away. There’s no point, not when he’s taking the strip of cloth and rushing to the bathroom to dampen it before returning to clean her up properly. Instead what she says, because she can’t help herself right now and anyway it seems an important distinction, is, “She’s never even _been with a woman_ before. I wouldn’t have made her first time doing with an audience. Don’t be distasteful.”

“My apologies,” Eric chuckles, because he loves that about his sister, how she draws very distinct lines but only about some moral issues.

“And there’s time for whatever will happen to happen,” she adds, all philosophically airy, tilting her head so he can tend to a trail of blood down behind her right ear.

“There is,” he murmurs, his voice going hollow all of a sudden.

And – oh, shit. She didn’t exactly think about the less-cheerful tangents this could have taken, but suddenly such a tangent has emerged and she doesn’t know quite what to do.

“Don’t be dramatic,” she mumbles, rolling her eyes preemptively.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you, sister,” he manages to say, his hand stilling.

“It’s not like he nearly killed me,” she exclaims.

“He poisoned you,” he retorts.

“Yes, well.” She doesn’t bother going into the details of how it’s not _technically_ poisoning, because she knows that in her case it more or less is (and given that it hasn’t entirely worn off yet, she doesn’t have the wherewithal to debate it). Instead she says, “You got me set up and contained and Willa kept me from doing anything idiotic and I’m coming down from it, all right? And he’s dead and there’s no more of that to be had and I’ll never do anything magical and stupid because of it again, _all right_?”

It’s his turn to make a face. “But what if he’d made you?”

She grits her teeth. Can’t he tell she doesn’t want to get into this? “Jessica still would have killed him and it would have been okay,” she decides. “Or, or it wouldn’t have been and I trust that if you had absolutely needed to you would have ended me.”

“How in the hell could I have done that?” he asks in a whisper.

“I don’t fucking know,” she hisses, defiant all of a sudden. “But you’d have done it and you’d have got on and you’d have remembered you still have Pamela and Willa to think about.”

“You know it’s not the same,” he mutters.

“No, it’s not,” she shrugs. She stops talking long enough to let him wipe the blood from around her lips, but once he’s moved on again she continues. “Your relationships with them aren’t and have never been your relationship with me, but they still matter to you.” She softens her voice. “While I appreciate the sentiment you’re getting at here, I hope you’re not foolish enough to drop everything in your sadness. You still have responsibilities, especially with Willa.”

“Sometimes I feel like Willa’s more your child than mine,” he says, and thank goodness, that’s made him smile again.

“In a way, Willa’s everyone’s child,” she says, but she’s smiling too, because she knows what he says is reasonable. “I think it’d be all the more reason, though, not to fold just because something happened to me.”

It’s so much easier to talk about the vague what-if of her own true death in the context of him and how he’d deal with it, not because it would only matter in that way but because this detaches her from it. That’s how she’s rationalizing it.

“You’re saying you wouldn’t if it were the other way around?” he asks.

She couldn’t handle that either, though. After all, this whole mess started because no matter what she can’t imagine any world where her brother’s not right there by her side.

“I’d be devastated,” she finally manages to say, pulling back definitively and drawing a leg up underneath her. “But no. I wouldn’t just – I know I have reasons to hold on.” And there’s a note of bitterness creeping into her voice that she can’t help, that she doesn’t have the impulse control to notice or tend to.

He opens his mouth to respond, then closes it, then opens it again; he sits back on his knees and stares at her. Yes, he’s definitely heard it there.

“You can’t honestly tell me that you wouldn’t think about who you were leaving behind,” she insists. “Especially after…” _After being left yourself_ is the implication and he sure as hell hears it.

“Stop,” he says.

“What. This must have been the sort of thing you said to him,” she retorts. “Begged with him to consider the ramifications, appealed to his emotions and your own.”

“You don’t –”

“Don’t tell me what I don’t,” she exclaims. “What did you two discuss before he met the sun? Not the cleaned-up pretty version you told the others. I want to hear the _truth_.”

It hits him all of a sudden that this sullenness, the one that’s been underlying this whole time, that’s not just from the blood, it’s so like the one that Jessica had regarding her own Maker’s fate. He feels so dumb for never having seen it before, so _horrible_ for not having – well.

“He wasn’t himself,” he begins like he always does. He can’t say anything against Godric, not really, not even now.

“Is that how you justify it?” she asks.

He frowns. “Sister…”

“ _What_ ,” Nora repeats. “Did you know I hadn’t seen him in nearly fifteen years before…? There had been letters, a phone call or two, but we – he – _I heard about my own Maker’s death from Nan fucking Flanagan_ , Eric.”

Abruptly she falls back on the bed, curls up on her side. It’s childish as fuck, but he understands. (She doesn’t care if he understands, she’s doing it anyway.)

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what,” she grumbles. “It wasn’t you did it.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” he says. “Or I _was_ , but only selfishly. All I could see was how it hurt _me_.”

She’s shuddering by now, but he can’t bring himself to climb up beside her or touch her yet, and she doesn’t ask for it. “I’m not surprised,” she murmurs. “You’ve always been that way when it comes to Godric. Emotional and greedy.”

“And you haven’t?”

“Not in the same way,” she says, and she turns over to stare him down, her expression suddenly the most rational it’s been in hours. “If anyone else hurt me like he did, even thought about it, you’d kill them. You know that.”

He sighs, because he knows that’s true. Even before this whole mess, he’s ended more than one life, human or vampire, for their so much as looking at his sister the wrong way.

“I fucked up,” he says simply. “Godric fucked up. And you, dear sister, you fucked up too. I’d think that you know by now that you don’t have to lie to me.”

She huffs indignantly. “Easier said than done,” she points out, but her expression is starting to waver.

And then all at once, he’s picking her up, holding her close. “Especially when you were lying to yourself too,” he whispers, though with no edge to his tone.

She shrugs. “May I have a bath?” she asks instead.

“Evading isn’t any better,” he chides gently.

“Be nice,” she pouts. “I’m coming down.”

“You started this,” he says as he carries her into the bathroom.

“And for now, I’m pausing it,” she declares. “And you know what else? You’re going to wash my hair _and_ braid it for me.”

He laughs. “Spoiled brat,” he declares.

“Yes, but I’m _your_ spoiled brat,” she hums.

“Mine,” he agrees, “and maybe Princess Jessica’s, too.”

“We’ll need to sort that out, you know,” Nora points out.

“Maybe not tonight,” Eric says.


End file.
